Forgiving the Unforgivable

PREFACE

This book presents a construct of forgiving that I believe is both theoretically sound and empowering for those who attempt to use it to forgive people who have harmed them. I do not view the material presented as a substitute for professional therapy but as a companion to it if people need additional help.

It is my sincerest hope that those of you who use this work to help you forgive the unforgivable are able to complete the journey of forgiveness if you choose to attempt it. I am told by all who have done so that the final destination is worth the trip.

Forgiving the Unforgivable was spawned from a lifelong interest in the problems people experience and the methods they use to resolve them. I am sure this interest evolved from my family’s commitment to people and their passion for inquiry. I thank them for these. I also want to thank my friends, who have given me their unswerving support during the preparation of the book.

My most special thanks go to all of the people who volunteered their stories of forgiving. Their names have been altered to protect their identities, but their experiences reveal the determination of the human spirit when it refuses to be broken by adversity. To all of you, I am deeply grateful.

Forgiving the Unforgivable could not have been realized without the support of the Kellogg Foundation and my agent, Jane Jordan Browne, the constructive comments of my editor, Natalie Chapman, and the expert assistance of Betty Zeps.

Introduction

My interest in forgiveness began many years ago, when I was a young social worker in Alaska. I was working with an adolescent girl who had witnessed her father murder her mother. The girl had also been raped by her father. Although many seasoned helping professionals have faced this situation fairly often, I was confronted for the first time with a client who, regardless of the evidence that lay before her about her father’s behavior and character, struggled determinedly to forgive him. Also for the first time, I was in a deep quandary about whether to help someone reach for an objective with which I was not certain I agreed.

When I left: full-time clinical practice to teach, questions about clients who wanted to reconcile with people who hurt them persisted; so did my students’ questions about the ultimate purposes of the helping process. Should people who are abused by their parents simply reject their own mothers and fathers? Should they express their rage toward others? For how long? What is enough? Should they break their vows of fidelity because their spouses become cruel or ill? Is the goal of empowering a person to assist that individual in placing blame on another? My fascination with the underlying value of helping others and with the goals of helping continued to spur me to attempt to find answers to these questions, mostly because I strongly suspected that the goals clients had for themselves were often not those of helping professionals.

Many people, whether professionals understand it or not, seem to need to make things right with each other when things have gone wrong between them. Forgiveness is one mechanism for righting wrongs. Over the course of my work, I have come to suspect that there are many more people than we can imagine waiting to hear the words I forgive you or Please forgive me so that they can finally feel at peace with the people they have once loved.

If a group of average people were asked the question When you review your life, what one thing about it still makes you feel bad? the answer for many would involve forgiving. Some would feel bad because they had been unable to forgive another; some, because they had not been forgiven by a person for whom they had once cared. Forgiveness is the method by which people in intimate relationships let each other off the hook for various acts of ruthlessness and unkindness. It is the figurative glue that holds together intimate bonds. But it is elusive; and remaining unforgiven or unforgiving is an all-too-common fate for countless individuals. Forgiving is among the most difficult of human undertakings; unfortunately, most of us have no idea how to forgive each other or even if we should attempt to do so.

Very little is actually known about forgiving and how it happens. In fact, more is written about the results of forgiving than about the process itself. For example, the end product of forgiveness is that it presumably repairs ruptures between people.¹ It is said to release those who injure others from paying off a debt, whether the debt is material or emotional. Forgiveness allows the forgiven to start all over as though his* slate of old behaviors were wiped clean.² It is said to be permanent; that is, once given, it cannot be retracted.³ But such observations shed little light on what it is—on what actually goes on in the hearts and minds of people who have been deeply wounded and who have struggled to forgive the person who did the wounding. In 1982, I set out to find some answers about the experience of forgiving the unforgivable.

From 1980 through 1983, I was fortunate enough to have been a fellow of the Kellogg Foundation (one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the country). As part of my fellowship, I decided to return to the classroom to audit some courses. In a doctoral seminar I attended one afternoon, the students were entertaining several questions: Are moral people required to forgive? Their answer was yes. Are they required to forgive even a tyrant like Rudolf Hess (who was still living in Spandau at the time)? Again, their answer was yes.

The logic behind the students’ consensus was that when tyrants act in injurious ways, they engender in the broader society the likelihood that hatred seething in victims of tyranny spills out in ever-widening spheres of influence onto nonvictims and eventually everyone connected with nonforgiveness. The hateful recriminations of a victim, their logic went, are as morally dangerous as the acts of the tyrant. Each one, the victim or the villain, is likely to contribute to a society’s evolution into a crueler place. Regardless of its source, hatred creates meanspiritedness in the human condition. So when an individual does not forgive one who injures him, he perpetuates evil and, in the end, affects the well-being of everyone. Forgiving, by this logic, is the only ethical response to villainy.

The problem, though, was that forgiveness was never well defined. If people have a duty to forgive, what exactly is forgiving? I began to examine other sources of information and, to my surprise, found that little is actually known about the subject. I scoured the literature, reexamined the philosophies of twelve-step groups (like Alcoholics Anonymous), and talked with other professionals. Finally, with the financial assistance of the Kellogg Foundation, I designed a study to pursue a logical course. I decided to interview people who had forgiven the unforgivable. To find individuals willing to talk about such difficult personal matters as unforgivable offenses, I placed ads in newspapers in six sites around the United States (and in New Zealand for comparison). Over the next two and a half years, I traveled to meet and talk with seventy respondents, each of whom had forgiven something he’d at first considered unforgivable. I met people in their homes, restaurants, city parks, or wherever else they felt free to talk. I heard stories of murders, unfaithfulness, lies, betrayals, abandonment, and viciousness, sometimes almost beyond belief. Each interviewee was audiotaped; and each tape was played and replayed until its contents could be analyzed. Slowly and surely, specific themes began to emerge. The experiences of the people I met are interwoven throughout this book. You will meet them as their words reveal the complex and profound nature of forgiveness.

From the study that forms the basis of much of this book and the many workshops I have presented on forgiving, along with twenty years of research, discussion with colleagues, clinical practice, and teaching students the art of helping, a theory of forgiving has developed. Before I discuss it, though, more needs to be said about human nature and the many ways we injure each other. Some injuries fall into the category unforgivable; some do not.

The singular characteristic that distinguishes human beings from all other species is that we knowingly and often without legitimate reason cause each other to suffer. We lie to each other, cheat each other, rape each other, pummel and abandon each other, humiliate each other, and betray each other. Even more peculiar, we most often do these things not to our enemies but to the people closest to us.

Human groups have always engaged in wars with enemies. Wars give groups the sanction to inflict violence on each other. Wars also create an environment in which one individual can find justification for causing another individual to suffer. But the vast amount of human suffering does not occur between warring groups on battlefields. Most of it takes place in a different war zone—between individuals in intimate relationships. Unlike injury in war, where hate precipitates violence, injuries between intimates are spawned from a mixture of love and other emotions. Whereas hate causes violence and hardens hearts, love precipitates injuries that break them. Unforgivable injuries are the injuries of intimate people. When they happen, hearts are broken, and the essence of intimacy is destroyed. So, the worst kind of human wounds occur not on battlefields but in our homes. The worst injurers are not enemies or strangers in a foxhole but our husbands and wives, children, parents, and friends. Wherever love has been a part of relationships, the shrapnel of human destruction is strewn in our living rooms and bedrooms in the form of aborted dreams and wounded hopes. Wars may terminate with the signing of peace treaties, but intimate injuries have no such formal mechanisms for ending them. The most intimate of injuries are often left festering and unresolved—either unforgiven or unforgivable.

Forgiving is not the same as pardoning.⁴ Pardoning releases people from punishments due them and usually is the result of the act of a person in authority. A governor pardons a prisoner, for example.⁵ Forgiveness, on the other hand, takes place between intimates; it does not possess the objectivity of pardoning.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetting, either. A wounded person cannot—indeed, should not—think that a fading memory can provide an expiation of the past. To forgive, one must remember the past, put it into perspective, and move beyond it. Without remembrance, no wound can be transcended.

Forgiveness is also not accomplished through pronouncement. The words I forgive you may be appropriate to minor, everyday accidents or social indiscretions, but if real damage has resulted between people, no mere words can effect significant repair.⁶

The one enduring idea about what forgiveness actually is (rather than what it is not) is reiterated in a common theme in the literature written about it. Forgiving is said to occur in a transaction.⁷ This transaction takes place between two parties—the offended person and the offender. It is supposedly an orderly series of exchanges that results in the repair of a ruptured relationship. The transactional model of forgiving occurs in the following sequence: First, the injured accuses his injurer. Next, the injurer steps forward and admits that he caused another person harm; then he not only helps but encourages the wounded person to express his own feelings—even if they are of rage. The injurer then accepts the wrongness of his actions and takes punishment if need be.⁸ He promises never to repeat his offense. There is an outpouring of emotion on the part of both individuals—guilt, sorrow, anger, and finally love. The end result is a renewal of commitment to each other and a restoration of what had been a nearly ruptured relationship. As with a cracked vase glued back together, in the ideal model of forgiveness, the relationship is repaired, and the individuals are ready to take on new commitments and burdens.⁹

The transactional model of forgiveness is shown in figure 1.

If forgiving occurs in an orderly manner for some people, a larger question becomes, how often does it actually take place? How applicable is the model to late-twentieth-century life in the United States? The answer I learned is, not very often.

For a transaction to occur between people, two essential elements are needed: Both people must be present to participate; and both must be willing to do so. For many people who have been hurt by those they have loved, this is simply not the situation. Most people forgive alone, with little or no help from others. The reasons for solitary forgiving are several and profoundly reflective of modern life. Changes in the twentieth century have created extraordinary circumstances where human relationships are concerned. Put simply, people—at least, most Americans—do not need each other to assure their survival. Children can leave parents, husbands can abandon wives, and friends need never speak to one another again. American life has made it possible for people to quickly sever their most intimate relationships and to leave behind those closest to them after one has hurt the other. We are a mobile society. We are prideful and competitive. We dislike losers. Many of us believe that forgivers are wimps or that people who stick around to help someone they hurt pick up the pieces are fools. The transaction of forgiving is impossible when one party is unwilling or unavailable to talk to the other.

Fig. 1 Transactional Model of Forgiveness

Modern society mitigates the necessity for reconciliation between warring factions or ruptured relations. This has not always been the case.

In primitive societies and in centuries past people had to rely on each other. Members of tribes or clans depended on one another to meet their most basic needs. Procurement of food, clothing, shelter, and safety was impossible without the cooperative efforts of each member. Each individual played a role essential to the survival of the whole. The loss of one person threatened the survival of all.

In hunting-and-gathering cultures, for example, each person—the hunter, gatherer, cook, caretaker of children, wise elder, and even the tribal historian—was essential to the well-being of the community. Fortunately or unfortunately, in contemporary Western culture, the mutual dependence of individuals has broken down. Today it is conceivable that an individual (an adult, at least) could exist entirely alone. He could go to the store for food and clothing, rely on his TV or VCR for entertainment, and do his work at a computer terminal in his condo. Interdependence at an interpersonal level has ceased to exist. Conceivably, a man or woman could work, eat, sleep, and die alone—cut off from all but the social and business institutions that meet his basic needs for food and shelter.

In primitive times, when one member offended another, it was essential that some mechanism for reconciling the injury was present. An errant member had to be allowed to return to the clan to ensure its survival, independent of the survival of the individual. No one could survive totally alone, and the group could not afford to lose any member.*

Forgiveness, apart from being a mechanism for mending ruptured relationships between two individuals, was a method of restoring peace to the human groups to which individuals belong.¹⁰ It was a stopgap that prevented the injuries between individuals from becoming hostilities between their families and prevented family hostilities from becoming wars between their clans. In that way, forgiveness was a mechanism of survival not only for those who depended on each other for their personal needs but also for those who were at odds with each other to begin with. Forgiveness prevented the spread of hatred.

Today we are less mutually dependent as individuals, couples, friends, neighbors, or communities. People can do without each other and move in and out of any or all of these human groups as often as they like. The wounded individual grapples alone, and the injurer can move on to other partnerships, friendships, neighborhoods, and communities, carrying with him only the baggage of past relationships. But this does not mean that people do not need to feel the peace that forgiveness brings. It means that it has gotten much harder to forgive.

Agents of Forgiveness

In the past as well as the present, churches and synagogues have been thought of as institutions of mercy, reparation, and expiation. The church, of all societal institutions, is linked with compassion and reconciliation. People who seek to forgive or to be forgiven might turn to their pastor, priest, or rabbi for help. But the clergy, even though they are church leaders, are also as involved with the technological and mobile modern scene as anyone else. When a clergyman is asked to help someone forgive an injurer, he may know neither the offended nor the offender. He can only second-guess why the harm occurred. The church, like other sectors of society, suffers from impersonalism and size; and those who would turn to it for help in forgiving are often confronted by that reality.

Others expected to foster forgiveness are members of the professional helping community. Psychologists, social workers, family therapists, and psychiatrists all work with clients for whom forgiving is a central issue. Professional training, however, rarely focuses on forgiveness as a goal in therapeutic intervention with clients. As a matter of fact, quite the contrary is often true. The therapeutic community—at least some facets of it—holds that empowerment or venting of anger is a major and most desirable end state of therapy.

As a rule of thumb, most helping professionals believe that if a client comes to think more positively about himself, improvement will take place in his relationships with others. So, therapy involves self-improvement and the learning of self-improvement techniques (assertion, relaxation, claiming one’s feelings, and so on). The therapeutic graduate may be able to function and over time may feel his wound less acutely. Deep inside, however, the residual effects of the injury may continue to poison him in the form of mistrust of others or misplaced anger. (Some people fly into fits of rage years after they have been injured at the simple mention of their offender’s name.) Wrongs righted in the self do not right wrongs between people who harm each other; they remain in silent places, waiting for the transaction of forgiveness and the relief it bears.

What do people who need to forgive an injurer actually do to heal their hearts? If therapists or clergy are not helpful, what recourse does a wounded person have? There are three ways to end a growing skirmish on a battlefield: raise a white flag of surrender, retreat in defiance, or fight to the bloody end. The same is true of injuries that occur on the battlefield at home. People can forswear their intractable positions and retreat; they can forgive; or when a method of forgiveness is unavailable, they can fight to the end.

The courtrooms in America are teeming with wounded and furious people. Acrimonious divorces, bitter custody feuds, and even small claims between friends are the order of the day in our litigious society. The legal system is one that forces face-to-face combat between an injured person and his injurer. When offenders can walk away from those they harm, the injured can exert what remaining control they have by forcing a confrontation with their injurers in courts of law. When there is no apology, a court case may follow.

In American society, justice and mercy are so closely intertwined that they often are difficult to distinguish. In fact, Judeo-Christian societies are supposed to be prime examples of justice and mercy merged. The unfortunate conclusion might be drawn that whenever mercy is not forthcoming, justice will be sought. If human beings need to make things right through forgiveness but are barred from an opportunity to do so, they may seek rightness in the form of justice.

Forgiving is the method by which the wounded person can readmit an outcast. In forgiving, a wounded person reopens his heart to take in and reaccept his offender. Upon reacceptance, the slate is wiped clean. But it is not possible to readmit someone who is not knocking on the door asking for readmittance; and most injurers not only do not knock at the door but have already opened new doors and stepped through them.

Still, forgiveness is possible to achieve. The reality is that more often than not, forgiveness occurs not as part of a transaction with the injurer but as a result of a solitary process doggedly and painfully pursued by a person who has been badly injured. In other words, forgiveness happens, but it too often happens with no outside help at all.

Unfortunately, an unforgivably wounded person must heal himself. The church or therapists may help, but without the opportunity to confront an offender directly, the offended person must still repair his own heart. Otherwise, he might waste his life waiting for either a chance to face his injurer or an apology that will never come.

The people interviewed for this book healed themselves. They forgave almost every kind of injury—some of them nothing short of heinous. Still, they forgave.

What they experienced in common was a progression through a sequence of phases that helped them to forgive, even though they had to do it alone. It is the solitary model of forgiveness and its phases that will be presented here. The ability of human beings to forgive the unforgivable—even if they have to do it alone—is a testament to all that is right about our species. It speaks to the fact that there remains, even in the latter part of the twentieth century, an inner conscience—a need to make things right when people have hurt and been hurt by each other. Forgiveness, whether a mechanism for survival or a basic need of the conscience, nonetheless happens. And when it is final, it imparts peace to the forgiver and restores a modicum of kindness to the human community as a whole.

* Because both men and women forgive their injurers, masculine and feminine pronouns will be used in alternate chapters throughout the remainder of the book.

* Among the pygmies in Africa, for example, an errant member was required to leave the village and go into the forest alone. He was, for a time, completely ostracized. No one spoke to him at all. The whole village discussed and reviewed his offense. After several days, the ostracized offender quietly and simply walked back into the village, uttering not a word until a designated child took him a bowl of food. The giving of food symbolically represented forgiveness by all members of the group and a willingness to reaccept the offender. Reacceptance assured his, and their, continued survival. In fact, the element of giving something tangible is often a part of a forgiving ritual and symbolizes the idea that reacceptance of those who harm others is itself a gift given by one person to another (C. Trumbull, The Forest People [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962], pp. 102-17).

PART I

Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury

CHAPTER 1

Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury

Forgiveness to the injured does belong.

JOHN DRYDEN, The Conquest of Granada

One Wednesday afternoon, Ann Roland drove home from her job as a nurse at the local hospital, just as she had done for the past eight years, expecting to arrive home to an empty house. When she pulled into her driveway, though, a midsized rent-it-your- self moving van was parked there. Ann got out of her car, approached the van, and peered inside. Then she saw her belongings—not all of them, but a television, some chairs, a cardboard wardrobe, boxes of unidentified objects, and even